Sunrise was just two hours away, but when his pregnant fiancee was hit with hunger pangs, Obed "OJ" DeLeon dutifully drove to a nearby Northwest Side taco spot to pick up some food.

Three off-duty Chicago police officers who allegedly had just been drinking at a nearby bar were also inside the Taco Burrito King, eating at a table as DeLeon walked inside complaining about a car blocking the parking lot. Brian Murphy, one of the cops, jumped up from his seat with his service weapon drawn, pointed the semi-automatic pistol at DeLeon's head and shoved him against a wall, surveillance video shows.

Advertisement

The two other officers, Jason Orsa and Daniel McNamara, joined in, too, along with a Marine friend who had just returned from Iraq. DeLeon was punched, knocked down twice, kicked, hit and held facedown on the tile floor of the crowded restaurant. His shirt was ripped off, revealing gang tattoos on his shoulder and chest.

"It happened so fast," DeLeon testified years later at a Chicago Police Board hearing about the March 2006 beating. "People were just jumping on my back, kicking me."

Even though the police board eventually fired Murphy and Orsa after two eyewitnesses and video confirmed they had started the fight, both still remain on the force more than a decade after the incident because a Cook County judge had overturned the firings.

But last month, an Illinois appeals court upheld their dismissals, saying it was "dumbfounded" by the judge's "inexplicable" ruling.

DeLeon and the two eyewitnesses who were arrested as well that night in 2006 were surprised to learn from a Chicago Tribune reporter that both officers were still on the force. All three said the handling of the investigation was another example of the city's reluctance to root out police misconduct.

"My (then-unborn) son is 10 years old now!" DeLeon, 32, said recently on learning the officers had been reinstated on the force and given back pay after the judge reversed their firings in 2012.

"The amount of evidence that they had against these guys, it's amazing to me that it's still going on," said Shawn Nelson, 37, a restaurant patron that night who tried to intervene on DeLeon's behalf. "I can't even believe it."

"This is the reason why the general public has issues with police officers," said Joseph Mularczyk, 36, the other eyewitness. "It's misbehavior like this. It's covered up. It's pushed under the table, and here we are 10 years later (and) these guys are still on the Police Department."

It had taken five years for Murphy and Orsa to be fired the first time. Now, four years after the two won their jobs back, the police board will fire them again unless the officers continue their legal challenge and appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. Their lawyers did not return phone calls seeking comment.

The police board found the evidence against McNamara insufficient to prove he took part in the beating and suspended him for 18 months for failing to tell supervisors of his and the other officers' involvement in the altercation. In addition, one of two sergeants who responded to the altercation, Louis Danielson, was given a six-month suspension for conducting what the police board found to be a nonexistent investigation — he never even went inside the restaurant or attempted to find out who had a gun. But the city dropped the suspension after Murphy and Orsa won their jobs back, clearing his record and awarding him back pay.

None of the officers could be reached for comment, and Anthony Guglielmi, chief spokesman for the Police Department, declined to comment other than to say the police board would begin the termination process for Murphy and Orsa once it has the appellate court order in hand.

All three officers had told investigators for Chicago's police oversight agency and later testified before the police board that DeLeon had yelled out gang slogans and threatened that he was a "cop killer" after he entered the Taco Burrito King at 5509 N. Harlem Ave.

Several surveillance cameras inside the restaurant captured the beating, but the videos contain no audio.

According to testimony before the police board, DeLeon asked who was the "a------" who had parked a Camaro blocking the entrance to the restaurant's parking lot.

Advertisement

"What if I'm the a------?" Orsa replied, city lawyers argued at the police board hearing.

"Then stop being an a------ and move your car," replied DeLeon, he and both eyewitnesses said in testimony that both the police board and appellate court found credible.

The videos, obtained by the Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request, show DeLeon talking, gesturing and leaning over directly behind the officers as they sat eating at a table. Suddenly, Murphy pulled out his gun, jumped to his feet and physically confronted DeLeon. The other plainclothes, off-duty cops as well as the Marine friend quickly joined in, swarming over DeLeon and warding off other patrons from intervening. The video shows DeLeon knocked to the floor, eventually rising to his feet again and taking a couple of swings at one officer before he was thrown to the floor again. He suffered only bruises, he later testified.

Chicago police responded to a 911 call of a "white man with a gun" — an apparent reference to Murphy — but DeLeon, Hispanic and unarmed, was hauled off in handcuffs, his shirt torn off him in the fight.

Nelson and Mularczyk, friends at the time who were waiting in line for food that night and did not know DeLeon, were also arrested after separately telling police that the four white men had started the fight.

"Is that the story you're sticking with?" Danielson asked the two, ordering them taken into custody "for being in the wrong place at the wrong time," both later testified.

In their recent interviews with the Tribune, both eyewitnesses said they did not know at the time that the three plainclothes officers were off-duty cops. They said they thought the beating was at least in part racially motivated.

The officers were allowed to leave the restaurant through a back door. Their names were never recorded in any police report, and none were even identified as complaining witnesses in the misdemeanor assault and battery charges brought against Nelson and Mularczyk.

An officer who didn't even speak to anyone at the restaurant was told to write up the police report, according to testimony before the police board.

Within a few days, DeLeon lodged a complaint with police, and he and both eyewitnesses were interviewed soon after the incident. But it wasn't until a year later that the officers were questioned by investigators for the Independent Police Review Authority, the much-maligned city agency that investigates the most serious allegations of police misconduct. In those interviews, the officers alleged for the first time that DeLeon had threatened police and yelled gang slogans in the restaurant.

Eighteen more months passed before IPRA tried to interview the sergeant who approved the criminal charges against DeLeon and both eyewitnesses, but he had retired by then, records show.

Advertisement

The records show the IPRA investigation limped along for years. One investigator asked supervisors for extensions on deadlines at least 23 times, according to the records.

In his testimony, DeLeon said officers never asked any questions about what had happened before taking him into custody.

"It was just quick handcuffs, get in the paddy wagon, you're going to jail," he said.

Danielson testified he saw no need to ask DeLeon any questions after seeing his gang tattoos.

"I concluded 100 percent assuredly that he was indeed an active member of the Spanish Cobra street gang," he said.

But DeLeon told the police board he had given up the gang life after he met the woman who would become his fiancee in 2003. After the 2006 beating, he had the "SC" tattoo on his right shoulder covered with another tattoo, he testified. But court records show he has three convictions since the incident, including for spitting on a cop that same year and an aggravated DUI in 2013.

In her 2012 ruling reversing the police board decision to fire the two officers, Judge Kathleen M. Pantle found that the officers' testimony was more believable and that the video supported their account as well.

She blasted DeLeon as an obvious gangbanger.

"All you have to do is look at him and know he's a gang member," a transcript quoted her as saying. "Anybody looking at the videotape knows that as soon as he walks in the door."

The judge also held that the glacial pace of the IPRA investigation had deprived the officers of their rights and called the probe "shoddy."

"This thing is a mess from start to finish," she was quoted as saying of the investigation.

Pantle also downplayed the testimony of Nelson and Mularczyk, saying they were "not disinterested witnesses" because of their arrests that night. The misdemeanor charges against both had been dropped when officers didn't show up at their first court appearance.

But in upholding the firings last month, the appeals court found that the weight of the evidence supported the police board's decision, noting that Murphy could have been fired just for pulling out his service weapon "unprovoked" in the crowded restaurant. The court concluded that both officers should have stayed and explained to police why the gun was drawn and DeLeon overpowered.

The court held that Orsa had repeatedly kicked DeLeon without justification and that both officers had attempted to cover up what happened.

The court also rejected the officers' contention that DeLeon had started the conflict by yelling the gang slogans and boasting he was a cop killer.

"We cannot ignore an even more troubling aspect of this case — the inherently improbable character of the officers' defense, which largely relied on stirring prejudices by suggesting that DeLeon's conduct was gang-related," appeals court Judge Michael Hyman wrote in the unanimous decision by the three-judge panel.

Neither DeLeon nor the two eyewitnesses ever filed lawsuits against police. In DeLeon's case, he told the Tribune that he didn't think he could after broaching the subject with an IPRA investigator.

Nelson and Mularczyk — neither of whom has a criminal record other than their arrest for this incident, records show — both said the spotlight on police misconduct in Chicago and across the country over the last couple of years has rekindled thoughts of their ordeal.

Both said they support police — Nelson's great-uncle was once Morton Grove's deputy police chief and his uncle spent more than 20 years with the department — but that more needs to be done to remove the bad officers who dishonor hardworking cops.